Question

I have the following code

$str = "keyword keyword 'keyword 1 and keyword 2' another 'one more'".'"another keyword" yes,one,two';

preg_match_all('/"[^"]+"|[^"\' ,]+|\'[^\']+\'/', $str, $matches);

echo "<pre>"; print_r($matches); echo "</pre>";

Where I want it to extract keywords from a string, and keep those wrapped within single or double quotes together, this above code works OK, but it returns the values with the quotes in it. I know I can remove these via str_replace or similar, but I’m really looking for a way to solve this via the preg_match_all function.

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => keyword
            [1] => keyword
            [2] => 'keyword 1 and keyword 2'
            [3] => another
            [4] => 'one more'
            [5] => "another keyword"
            [6] => yes
            [7] => one
            [8] => two
        )

)

Also, I think my regex is a little be soppy, so any suggestions for a better would would be good 🙂

Any suggestions / help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You’ve almost got it; you just need to use lookarounds to match the quotes:

'/(?<=\')[^\'\s][^\']*+(?=\')|(?<=")[^"\s][^"]*+(?=")|[^\'",\s]+/'